Posted
by
michael
on Thursday November 11, 2004 @09:03AM
from the elvis.mp3-has-left-the-building dept.

Artifex writes "BetaNews is reporting that the doors at Nullsoft have been closed: 'The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned. Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.'" The Register also has a story.

Here's an odd thought... why bother? Quite a few Winamp clones exist because the WinAMP design is not hard to replicate. It's really not much more than a way of loading, inspecting, and playing audio files from disk, http, or streaming servers. Here's a few example clones:

Well, they have already released most of the Winamp 3 sourcecode (without any of the DRM stuff) under the Wasabi project [wasabidev.org].

Furthermore, the Nullsoft-guys already brought us the open Gnutella protocol.

All of this would indicate that the good people at Nullsoft are pretty cool with open source. So if the Winamp 5 source code is not going to be released, then I think we should blame AOL for that, not Nullsoft.

Furthermore, the Nullsoft-guys already brought us the open Gnutella protocol.

Might want to check yourself on this, Nullsoft brought us the Gnutella protocol but they did not make it open. Other talented individuals reverse-engineered the Gnutella protocol. Nullsoft never released any source-code or specs.

All of this would indicate that the good people at Nullsoft are pretty cool with open source

Might want to check the license on wasabi http://www.wasabidev.org/license.php [wasabidev.org] you can't even distribute the closed source wasabi.dll with what you write using that sdk, ie it is useless and windows only. It is most certainly NOT open source./p

Just remember: Corporate America isn't about *you*. It's about enhancing "value" to "shareholders".

This means that if they have to make 1000 employees miserable by laying them off for a quarter (or eight) so the financials look rosy for Wall Street, they'll do it.

And if they have to gobble up a superior technology as a bargaining chip, they'll do it.

Corporate America is the ultimate communal reptilian brain: cold, efficient, ruthless, amoral, it WILL achieve it's goals, no matter who it has to hurt. Things are very black and white in Corporate America: profit/good loss/bad.

Open Source, on the other hand, is very mamillian: there are others "like it", there's a *community*. Altruism actually has a place in this scheme.

And it drives the lizards crazy. If one lizard attacks another lizard, no other lizard intervenes. If a lizard attacks a mamal, all of the mamal's kin come down on that lizard like, well, a pack of wild animals.

Hence...the antipithy between Corporate America and Open Source.

This is a metaphore, to be sure: some businesses "get it". These are the businesses that can plan further than a quarter ahead at a time, or are big enough that they can say "screw the Street" and take a short term hit (IBM?)

Companies are like lizards, they are always prey to bigger lizards.

Open Source is like a herd of (your favorite heard animal here). They can only be taken down by a BIG lizard or another pack based life form.

decent try, but real bad example. In most pack animals, the smallest and weakest are left to die when then chase is put on by the predator(your lizard if you want). There are very few mamalian species that rush to the rescue and try to fend off the attack, but their are a few(so I guess it works sometimes).

a good example is an elephant herd, in which the elders will protect the children from attack and if a parent is killed, the young are still cared for by others. This is not the norm though.

on the other hand, isn't everything you described what a profit maximizing business is about. take something, give it value for long enough to profit, and always reevaluate the prodcut to see if its still worth it to you. It could very well be that those employees are now out of work, but if their work wasn't profitable, there is no valid reason to keep them. Obviously AOL does not feel the work of Nullsoft to be profitable.

Of course, you could not blame AOL for failed companies and blame the greed of the head's of those companies who sold out to AOL rather than keep doing a good thing. You know, even if bill gates walks up to me and offers me a billion dollars for something I have, there is no force on this planet that forces the sale.

AOL actually didn't really care too much about the program or how good it was. At the time Netscape was the start page of a majority of the internet. They bought Netscape for their page views, they sold all of the programs (except for the browser) off to Sun. They kept the browser so they could keep the clicks, unrealizing that MS would end up flipping their position and that in short while adveritsement dollars wouldn't be quite the same.

No it wasn't that. You give them too much credit. AOL are simply incompetant.

At one time, Netscape, Nullsoft, Spinner etc. were considered to be 'divlets', all with their own identity, all churning out cool stuff that could be reused etc. You think about what these groups produced:

Netscape made Mozilla & Gecko. Enough said. It also had a great portal until some dickheads started infesting it with popup windows, rendering it unusable.

So what does AOL do? Drive them all into the ground and suck Microsoft's cock. Oh I think some of these things are offhandedly in the AOL client (e.g. radio) but innovation? What's that?

The reason for all this is that AOL has a corporate culture of infighting and conservatism. If two groups compete for some work, it is the one that doesn't rock the boat, that promises the fastest results and with a vision compatible with marketing drones that wins. The AOL client feature requirements and schedule dictates what goes ahead. It doesn't matter that an inferior product will go in or that it will become a millstone in a year or two.

Meanwhile the innovative product withers on the vine and the group responsible is shitcanned. Why? I don't know but I reckon IE & WMP are like comfort blankets to AOL marketing. If you start going all scary on them by showing them something without 'Microsoft' in the title, they get nervous. I bet even the Mac group in AOL feels like an unwanted child.

Consider what could have been. Winamp 5.0 has streaming music, videos, a library, a CD burner, ripping, an integrated browser. With a little push it could have been iTMS. Time Warner has tens of thousands of tracks and movies to sell and AOL is (or was) the perfect outlet to sell them. The much vaunted 'synergy' they kept talking about was right under their noses. But apparantly that's not much use to a massive multi media conglomerate. Oh no, "let's sack them all".

Or consider Gecko. It was cross-platform, standards compliant and modular. AOL could free themselves from Microsoft forever. They could develop a cross-platform and modern client. They wouldn't have to wait for MS to fix bugs, or workaround some broken implementation - they could do whatever they liked with it. So what does AOL do? It stumps for the bitrotten piece of crap from their mortal enemy. And I'm sure Microsoft is ecstatic about that, since it basically ties AOL's hands.

The problem was that Netscape was making Mozilla the open source world and not for their corporate masters at AOL. They five or six years dinking around writing UI toolkits and bugbases and pontificating on standards, and when they finally released something (NS 6), it was a pile of ass.

It wasn't 5 or 6 years. It was approximately 3 years to write a modern standards compliant brower from scratch to the point that AOL could have taken it up. Netscape 6 wasn't much to write home about, but even that was emb

Really, did we ever see evidence that AOL had any intention of using Netscape or Winamp for anything, or was it just to kill the projects?

Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence. I see no evidence AOL ever made any product that was truly good. Their corporate culture seems to discourage excellence. It's why nobody likes them, and why anything they try to "assimilate" ends up dead within a few years.

You're thinking of foo_looks 2.0. I've been using this plugin for a couple of months, it's rock-solid and has some great looking skins out. You can read up on it at the foo_looks 2.0 Guide [btinternet.com].

Like itunes, but open source and really really slim on resource usage. Really, I've never been so excited with a player since I've found wxMusik. It has a media library, dinamic queries,it's interface is slim, just give it a try!

Nah. Nullsoft/AOL would have had to have a music store from the getgo in order to compete with the vast library that iTMS has amassed. iTunes is now synonomous with cheap music with a decent interface.

Nullsoft/AOL would just not be able to compete at this late stage in the game. Others have tried but it seems that Apple is continuing to win that battle.

Is this good? Maybe not. We certainly don't want a single viable option for music playing/purchasing but I really don't think that an open source project from Nullsoft/AOL will be able to compete *now*.

Perhaps in three years we'll have Mozzila SoundSiren, which will spark a lawsuit threat, so the name will be changed to PhonicPhoenix, which will cause ANOTHER lawsuit, making the offical product AcusticAvian.

Now that these guys are done with AOL maybe they can get on with their careers. For future reference: have an exit event next time guys so you don't get tied up with AOL or whoever buys it out from under you. Then we all profit because we get cool new toys and you get a pile of dough, AND no responsibility for 9-5 crap.

This is a sad day in free software history. Screw you AOL. (I know this will be redundant)... Winamp is one of the better free programs out there, I guess the few remaining will have to migrate to xmms.

I like winamp since it doesn't suck up many more processor cycles or bytes of memory than necessary to play MP3s, at least relative to the other bloatware out there. It also doesn't have a million features I don't need, just a few that I never use. RIP

Being primarily a Mac user my experience with Winamp was brief, but I had many friends who swore by it. So, what was the cause of Winamp's demise? Is it that Windows Media Player got better? Is it that people just don't care much what play's their MP3's? Did it lose its cool factor or geek appeal?

Winamp was one of those Must Have Apps for Windows, and heralded much of the MP3 success. After that half-yearly re-install of Windows, WA was one of the first apps to go back in. So you could play MP3s while reinstalling Office etc.

But after it went to version2, things became less rosy. Version 1.x worked a charm on my old 266/512mb peecee, but the 2.x series was dog slow and ridden with feature creep. I wonder if all the dumbass features in 2.x was something AOL mandated in the app. Rest of story: I went Linux, the Mac and never looked back.

Windows?
If anyone wanted to listen to my Icecast streams, or the ogg recordings I made, I always pointed them at Winamp, as it worked, and was free. And I couldn't be bothered answering lots of questions about codecs, and stuff.
What's the best thing now?

Looking back, I don't know how I got along with WinAmp's retarded playlist system. It was literally just a list of however many hundreds or thousands of MP3's you had. iTunes was much better in terms of organizing your music.

I've tried lots, but none have been as satisfying as winamp. I wouldn't pretend to be an audiophile, but from a purely user perspective the best (windows) alternatives I found were

iTunes - great, I love the library/sorting features. It just works and works well. Uses a lot of memory though and not the most responsive app in the world. Ogg support through an experimental quiktime codec extension (I think).

Foobar2000 seemed very powerful and very customiseable, but I didn't really have the time to invest to get it set up like I wanted. The interface style sheets were very powerful, but it lacked volume control at the time - which was just a pain. Seemed to support every codec I've ever heard of (and lots I haven't).

Had really good luck with jOrbis from www.jcraft.com. I just added the applet to my Shame of the 80's [crackrabbit.com] site. It seems to work everywhere, unlike most java applets... could be that it does exactly one thing: plays ogg streams.:-)

Hmm... how about Winamp [winamp.com]? You can continue to download Winamp 5.05 from their website, and the announcement said they will continue to release minor updates, such as security patches and plugin support. Unless you change to a brand-new streaming format that only a new player supports, why should people switch away from Winamp? Just because AOL is letting the rest of the Nullsoft team go, it doesn't mean that you have to stop using a program that really whips the llama's ass.

Can anybody recommend a good alternative? I am a Windows user (I can't get my nVidia chipset ethernet to work under Linux). The replacement should be capable, and free (no "register for only $39 for bonus features").

And before anybody mentions it, Real Player and Windows Media Plaer are NOT viable alternatives for me (but I think that Real's "Annabelle the sheep" is hilarious -- sheep are funny, just watch "A Close Shave").

The alternative I like best is iTunes. I wouldn't run it on an older machine but it was decent on my 1.2ghz Athlon and perfectly okay on my AthlonXP 2500 and AthlonXP 3200...

+free+excellent for LARGE (40GB+) music collections. their playlist and library features blow everybody else away. this is the "killer feature" for me. absolutely.+iTunes music store if you're into that (I'm not)+iPod support (I liked it even before I got an iPod)+easy to add artwork to albums+nice support for tagging multiple file

"What's this ogg thing?" "Open it in Winamp! You have the full version, right?" "Uh, what are these s3m/mod/it files?" "Just open them in Winamp."

Okay, so Winamp will still exist as a reanimated corpse, but the question remains - what am I going to tell people to use now to open these obscure geek music formats? It's not like iTunes would particularly help here, and Microsoft definitely won't care either...

I remember when Nullsoft got picked up by AOL: a mix of happiness in the community that they would finally be paid, and fear of what AOL would do to screw things up. This is worse than I think most had suspected.

Although, on the bright side, winamp has reached near perfection. Either 2.9x for the minimal side of things, or 5.x for the complete package. The sad thing is, every time we'd think that winamp had reached the status of the perfect audio player, Nullsoft would release an update and make perfectio

A couple years ago I was tired of Winamp seeming to eat a crapload of system resources and switched to Foobar 2000 [foobar2000.org] and never looked back.

But Winamp was the first free gui audio player that I ever really enjoyed. I remember sending playlists to friends as a way to encourage them to download it.
Thanks for helping to make computers cool, Nullsoft. You were great.

The BetaNews article is a bit off, as is the story it spawned over at The Register (whose headline for the piece was just ridiculous.).

As usual, Winamp Unlimited [winampunlimited.com] sets it straight with not only details on an upcoming 5.06 version of Winamp, but details on what the former Nullsoft-ees are doing now and a naked picture of their ex-Product Manager.

I know I'm going to be fighting the current on this one, but here goes anyways.

Why is this a big deal? Don't get me wrong, I've been a WinAmp user for years, and I love the program for playing my MP3s. But just because it's not going to get any more updates, why is that a big deal?

I mean, we're talking about a program designed for little more than playing audio (and later video) files. Once that is accomplished, and once the bugs have been relatively shaken out, anything else is just the beginnings of bloatware.

WinAmp has seemed to be relatively bug free to me, and works for what it was designed (audio/video) files. Why do we *NEED* more updates (other than if more bugs are found, of course)?

I regret to inform you all that I have quit Nullsoft. To many of you, this news may come as quite a surprise, while those who know me best, it's no surprise at all.

It's hard to describe the experiences of the last year. Nearly a year ago, we released Winamp 5.0 and finally reclaimed our user's hearts. It was a very proud moment for our entire team.

Since then, for varying circumstances, much of the team has left the company. It's been tremendously difficult to recover from the losses of such core team members and close friends.

Those of us left behind have tried our best to pick up the pieces and keep moving forward. Unfortunately, given our current environment, continuing to move forward has become tremendously difficult and frustrating, to say the least.

That said; I was recently presented a wonderful opportunity to work at Apple with the iTunes team. I hope to bring much of my experience from Nullsoft to Apple with the hopes of making a tremendous difference there.

The fact is; there's never a good time to leave something that you love so much. Given the state of things today it was appropriate for me start planning a life after Nullsoft.

I want to thank you for how much you've all contributed to making Winamp such a huge success. I'd like to appreciate the efforts of all the volunteers who've poured their heart and soul into this place, all the skinners and developers who helped the rest of us customize Winamp to our hearts content, and all my friends at Nullsoft who made working here more than a job, but a family.

I ask that all of you who work so hard, please, keep working hard. There are still a few of us left at Nullsoft and they're doing their best to keep this ship afloat. You're the only thing that can help them do it.

For those of you who would like to keep in touch with me, feel free to reach me at 'steve at gedikian dot com'. You can also keep tabs on what I'm up to by going to my homepage at http://www.gedikian.com.

I love you all and I can't thank you enough for making this chapter of my life so wonderful.

Peace.

-s

I would say the emotional overtone of his post is well understandable, Winamp certainly did build itself up an immense fanbase with it's great (and free) software, it's climb to the top of the proverbial heap of MP3 players showing dedication of the programmers that built and maintained it.

Farewell, last of the true Nullsoft team, and good luck in future ventures!

Pay a hundred-million bucks for a company with a killer app and a helluva group of innovative engineers. Now that you own the company, make sure all those engineers know you are in charge by stifling the creative process. Strangle that som'bitch til' it's dead; I mean, until there is virtually NO innovation left. Revoke all of the "Next Big Things" that the engineers create. Casually compel the founder and creative genius to leave the company while you're at it. Persevere until all development -- whether it's creative development, or even just suck-ass development -- has all but ceased.

Voila! You've just shown the world, in textbook fashion, how to flush $100m down the toilet. Not to mention the fumbling of a precious opportunity.

You're looking at this over the long term. Think about it in 6-month chunks (like the execs at AOL do):

Exec 1 buys a great little company for a reasonable price considering the boom (later known as a bubble). He gets a lot of credit and a promotion.

Exec 2 takes over and refocuses the division on its strengths - service. Exec 2 keeps costs down by discouraging research and development and promoting 'synergy'. Since AOL owns two of every type of software out there, they underfund half the company in the name of savings. Exec 2 gets a promotion.

Exec 3 takes the new position and wonders why Exec 2 was so highly regarded. Why underfund a product when you can cut funding all together and save even more. Exec 3 takes a CEO job with another fortune 500 company.

Exec 4 takes the job in 2005 and finds a small upstart making a great new music player. They buy the company for $200 million. Exec 4 gets a promotion.

*** Thank you for registering Winamp ***(etc, etc)Since Winamp is uncrippled nag-free shareware, this key doesn't do anything in Winamp. You can, however, for fun, enter the key into the 'shareware' tab of Winamp's about box.(etc etc) Now here's the important part:This registration is valid for ALL versions of Winamp, past, present and future.(etc, etc)---Justin FrankelNullsoft, Inc.---

...and it did kick the Llama's ass. I've got bad eyes and it let me make the control panel DOUBLE SIZE, which was a godsend.

I went through, hrm, 8 or 10 OS upgrades. I almost never downloaded a new version. It did only a few things and it did it well.

My happy world came to an end when I moved to Windows XP and Winamp stopped working. So I got the latest version and found that after 5 years my registration code didn't work anymore. So I wrote NullSoft:

In a desperate attempt to contact someone at NullSoft, I send this letter to you.

Dear Human Being, presumably one employed by NullSoft:

Back in 1997 I paid 10 hard earned dollars for Winamp. I just downloaded the 5 Pro version and discovered that my registration key doesn't work! Could this please be remedied? Here's the text of the email you sent me ages ago: (etc, etc)

Thank you for writing WinAmp, My name is Larry, I will be assisting you today.

You can find your Registration Key in your confirmation e-mail. If you do not have your confirmation e-mail, you can also retrieve your Registration Key by viewing the details of your purchase using the lookup at the address listed below: (etc, etc)

Hrm. Larry appears to not have read my email, for, Lo! I did have a conformation email, in fact, I sent him a copy of it.

NOW, I remembered the whole "AOL buys NullSoft" thing and it occurs to me that I'm in the hands of an organization with infinite cruelty and infinite patience. I tried to break through again:

3) Since I paid for the product BEFORE Nullsoft ever used Digitalriver for order fulfillment, looking up my order would be fruitless.

Either the human Larry was incensed at my sarcasm or the Perl Script Larry couldn't handle the language for I haven't heard back from NullSoft/AOL/Time/Warner yet.

So I bumble along with the latest freebie version of Winamp feeling generally dispossessed - I have a lifetime agreement with NullSoft and the parent company won't take my phone calls, so to speak. I tried sending email to Justin Frankel and it bounced - now I know why.

Anyone know know a lawyer who will take on a class-action lawsuit for 1/3rd of $10?

If AOL is halting its development of WinAmp, it could score lots of credit with the open source crowd by publishing the WinAmp source code under GPL. They'd be done with it just the same, but they'd continue to stymie their competitors with the player that wouldn't die, at no cost to them. Including the low management wind-up cost of releasing under the GPL, rather than some other license (especially one they roll themselves). OTOH, if they have more unholy alliances with "competitors" like Microsoft (like their IE AOL browser), they might strangle this beast just to hear it scream.

Well kinda.....Back in 1997 I wrote an mp3 streaming server that was originally intended as the audio equivalent of a webcam I could chat and play music.... obviously this quickly turned into the webs first live mp3 radio station. Problem was that there were no mp3 players that could stream content, I had to give my friends a perl script wrapped around mpg123. (as it happened this script also turned the client into a relay server, creating the earliest p2p streaming distribution system).

So it laboured in obscurity for a while until Winamp added HTTP streaming support and suddenly I could tell all those windows users to download winamp and point it at port 3223 on the server cluster. The code was released under the GPL, and I had a few downloads, but it required some real hackish thinking to get it to work for most people. That's when I started getting job offers in California (I was working as an astronomer in Northern Ireland).

Of course then Shoutcast got released and it pretty much did what mp3serv did, mp3serv promptly became even less interesting. But that didn't matter, because mp3serv was so obscure that nobody ever found it, it was only once there was a proprietory solution that people started to look for an open source solution. Icecast came along, it was much cleaner and smarter than mp3serv, so I took all the good bits from mp3serv and integrated them into Icecast and LiveIce.

That was 1999, by that point I was ready to quit my PhD and take a real job......

You can still stream. There are plenty of tools available. Shoutcast (is|was) a really handy directory! But, Nullsoft own(s|ed) both Winamp AND Shoutcast. Hopefully someone else will come up with a service aping theirs!

I think it's just you. What the hell does that even mean, it needs to move forward? It plays music files, it lets you choose them and fast forward them. What the hell else do you need? A built-in web browser and tax advisor?Ridiculous. Or, in/. speak, rediculous.

I don't think skinning and eye-candy is that important. Winamp2 interface is good enough. There are other more important fields to advance. I would like to have a MPlayer backend to play all the media files in XMMS. (There is also a plugin for video files, but why not a plugin to play *every* file through MPlayer?)

I think that this is an opportunity for Google. They could buy up companies like this, combine them with various other companies or open source software and come up with a Google OS or a "fascia" for Windows.

Why would Google do any of those things? WA never made a dime for AOL, and in that respect was a poor investment. I'd say the same thing if Google were to do what you suggested. Unless they can make money off of it, it wouldn't be worth their time.

WA never made a dime for AOL, and in that respect was a poor investment.

Compeltely untrue. AOL gets a lot of mileage out of Shoutcast/NSV. Plus, the NS team developed their internal media player, Unagi. Shoutcast is enough reason to believe that AOL will never sell off Nullsoft or Winamp.

Nullsoft never made a dime for AOL for the same reason that Netscape never made a dime for AOL...because AOL never had the balls to bundle them as the default media players and browsers, even though it was their intent when they purchased said companies.

I mean, why the hell do you think Winamp added video capability? They were gearing it up as a WiMP competitor, and got cold feet. Same thing for Netscape...they developed it, then got cold feet and signed a contract to continue including IE with AOL.

Well if Google wants to stray from it's core business this could be a good idea. Buy nulsoft and turn winamp into an Itunes killer. Buy Rio and and intergrate there players into the whole Google Music Store. Or they could just keep doing what they do and making money.

I and everyone else I've heard from thought Winamp 3 was much worse than Winamp 2. I tried 3 and quickly went back to 2.

Winamp 5 fixed most of the problems with Winamp 3. The stuff you have to pay for in Winamp 5 is strictly optional and for convenience, you could always use Lame and EAC to do at least as good a job with a little more work.

Sorry, but you and I strongly disagree on this! Winamp 5 is the best Winamp I've used. I really wish there was an OSX version of it, as a matter of fact!

iTunes is nice, and since getting an ipod, it's more or less a requirement, but it still lacks features that Winamp 5 brings to the table.

You mention that Winamp5 is unstable and slow, and that may be on your hardware, but on mine it flies (On both a 3Ghz P4, and a AMD1600 system), and it resolved all instability that Winamp3 brought to the table. In contrast, itunes is a f'in power hungry beast! On Windows it slows the whole system down at times, something Winamp5 has never done, and even on my dual 2ghz. Mac, it can freeze the whole system at times. Not too cool... If Winamp5 were out for the Mac, and gave me ipod features simuilar to itunes, itunes would never be used again on my systems.

You also bitch (sorry... When you call things a "steaming turd", you're bitching, rather than making a point) about how Winamp 5 was moving away from being free, but only the pro version was. The regular version has more than enough capabilities for 99% of the users out there, and for those who wanted more, they could pay a small fee to upgrade it to the pro version. Not a bad deal IMHO, and it's a helluva lot better than a time-limited trial.

Not to mention the streaming media capabilities that Winamp5 offers: The.nv video format provides freekin' great quality, considering it's rather meager bandwidth requirements. It allows you to do much more than itunes does in this respect, and again... All for free.

As for your comments about people reverting to winamp3... I haven't met anyone who feels that way. In fact the opposite's true, from what I've seen. I know several people who had wrote Winamp off after v3, but came back loving it after v5 hit the streets.

Finally, I have to point out that their library is the best I've seen. It automatically updated and removed dead tracks as they were shuffled around, which is something itunes still doesn't pull off that well, and the way it imports both video and audio files has allowed me to do some very granular sorting by putting the files into named folders.

As an example, I can search for, and find items with such wide-ranging search terms as "Rated-G animation", "Industrial music", "Sheep on Drugs", "The Simpsons", "Rock Music", "Rated-R movies", and "Kids Television", and get very specific, meaningful results. This allows anyone in my house to quickly pull up media without having to know how I've sorted my collection. itunes doesn't even come close to this level of organization.

Summary: I hope this isn't the end of Winamp. They lost me w/Winamp3, but really made up for it with v5. I hope someone either buys the source, or it's open-sourced. This would be a very sad ending for such a great piece of software!

I don't like nor need playlists, I just want to play an album the files of which are in this folder, please.

You can do exactly what you want, right in iTunes, without playlists. Use the "Browse" button at the top-right corner.

I've found that the best way to make iTunes organize your music the way you want is to trust iTunes. It took a giant leap of faith for me (having always been a launch-winamp-from-windows-explorer kind of guy). But if you let iTunes handle the music organization, you'll find that it gives you the flexibility to do more than any other method out there.

I've now stopped organizing my music by hand (creating a folder for each artists, and album, and blah blah blah) and just let iTunes keep everything organized. It works much better since it synchronizes folder and file names with changes you make in the ID3 tags (and whatever the tags for AAC files are called). I also (usually) no longer browse my music collection from Windows Explorer, but just browse with iTunes. Even without playlists you'll find it's just as efficient (if not more so) than browsing files directly.